San Diego Police Play Up Differences With L.A. : Cities: Criticism of LAPD by local officials was quick and harsh after the beating of Rodney G. King. Los Angeles bashing again grows in intensity.

SAN DIEGO —  Long before the Los Angeles riots broke out, San Diego law enforcement officials sought to persuade the public not to hold them responsible for the sins of the Los Angeles Police Department.

In doing so, police invoked one of the most effective and commonly used techniques in San Diego civic life: Los Angeles bashing.

Just days after Rodney G. King was beaten by a group of Los Angeles Police Department officers on March 3, 1991, the executive assistant police chief in San Diego, Norman Stamper, told the local press that the King beating was “brutal and cowardly.”

Bob Burgreen, the city’s reformist police chief, soon honed a line he has used consistently to help the populace differentiate between his troops and those in Los Angeles: “The San Diego police are not an invading army.”

The infamous 82-second videotape was shown to all 1,850 San Diego officers at roll call as an example of what not to do and as a warning about the kind of overreaction that can get a San Diego officer fired.

When computers were installed in squad cars, the first instruction given to San Diego officers was that they risked being fired if they sent racially derogative messages like those uncovered by the Christopher Commission, which investigated the Los Angeles Police Department. “We are not Los Angeles,” said one police official.

Make no mistake, the antipathy San Diego feels for Los Angeles is real and not just some rivalry hyped up by chamber of commerce boosters or sports teams to sell tickets.

In 1912, in one of the more celebrated events in San Diego history, police righteously swept through the red-light district and arrested 138 prostitutes. The 136 who were unrepentant were put on a northbound train on the theory that their profession was more suited to Los Angeles than God-fearing San Diego.

In the past decade the hottest political slogan in San Diego has been to prevent “Los Angelization.” A popular button into the 1970s read: “We Don’t Give a Damn How They Do It in L.A.”

Neil Morgan, senior columnist at the San Diego Union-Tribune, traces San Diego’s attitude toward Los Angeles back to hard feelings engendered when Los Angeles “stole” San Diego’s railroad lines in the 1880s and built a commercial port that eclipsed San Diego’s natural harbor.

The late Otto Bos, press aide for Pete Wilson as he rose from San Diego mayor to U.S. senator to California governor, used to joke that San Diego children were taught by their mothers to walk, talk, and hate Los Angeles, “not necessarily in that order.”

When the verdicts in the King case were announced, San Diego police officials were among the first to denounce them. “We wanted to convince our African-American community and other skeptics that there is no universal brotherhood of silence,” Stamper said.

As the second verdicts in the King beating case loom, the “we’re-not-Los Angeles” rhetoric has appeared to escalate.

“Our Police Department is nowhere like the Los Angeles Police Department when it comes to how we’re viewed by the community as a whole, and particularly by the minority community,” Burgreen said recently. “I think it’s almost night and day. We don’t want racist cops, we don’t want an invading army mentality, we don’t want our cops putting everybody up against the wall all night.”

In maintaining a psychological separation from Los Angeles, no detail is too small for San Diego.

Last year, a police task force, which had worked for months to gauge sentiment among the rank-and-file officers, recommended that the city of San Diego switch from tan police uniforms to the more traditional blue uniforms.

The idea was immediately vetoed at City Hall by then-Mayor Maureen O’Connor and City Manager Jack McGrory.

Among their reasons: The Los Angeles police wear blue uniforms.